A self-contained terminal file manager with modern features and built-in tools, while staying true to the heritage of classics such as Norton Commander and Midnight Commander. Written in Rust with Ratatui. It aims to need no external tools for its core features: the viewer/editor with syntax highlighting, archive handling, remote (FTP/SFTP/SCP) clients, disk explorer and process explorer are all built in.

The installed executable is named rc for quick typing.

• Two panels with full, brief, details and tree view formats, vertical or horizontal split, configurable sort, multi-file selection, type markers and file-type colors. Full mouse support.
• File operations — copy / move / delete with a progress window and transfer-speed chart, rich overwrite handling, chmod / chown / symlink (with recursion), and make-directory.
• Built-in viewer (F3) — text and hex modes, search, goto, line wrap, syntax highlighting, a rendered Markdown mode for .md files, and hex-color swatches. Pages huge files straight from disk.
• Built-in editor (F4) — mcedit-style block copy/move/delete, clipboard, search & replace (literal or regex), undo/redo, syntax highlighting, and an in-place hex editor for arbitrarily large files. Launch straight into it with rc /edit <file> (or the installed rcedit <file> shortcut), or rc /edit with no file for a blank buffer that prompts for a name on the first save; closing the editor then exits.
• Multi rename — batch-rename selected files with a masked, live two-column preview, counter, case transform and search-and-replace.
• Find file, Compare directories, Find duplicates, and a side-by-side Compare files diff with in-place merging.
• Checksum — compute a CRC32/MD5/SHA-1/SHA-256/SHA-512 digest of a file with a progress bar, and optionally verify it against a pasted reference checksum.
• Archives — browse .zip, .tar(.gz/.bz2/.xz), .7z and .rar like directories; copy in/out, delete, and compress a selection.
• Remote filesystems — SFTP, SCP and FTP/FTPS, each mounted into a panel; copy/move/delete works transparently across local, remote and archive panels.
• Disk explorer (treemap of disk usage), process explorer (btop-style system monitor), and a disk manager (Linux) to mount/unmount/format/sync drives and flash or image raw disk images.
• Network connections (Linux) — listening ports with their programs and all active connections with their type, service, live per-connection traffic rate (with a sparkline) and a details view; filter, sort, kill the owning process, and an optional root password for full visibility. A per-service overview diagram (Tab) groups connections into colour-coded cards showing each peer IP and its direction, with clickable/navigable addresses and reverse-DNS lookups.
• Look & feel — many color themes (fully customizable via themes.toml), truecolor animated gradients, an optional CPU/memory status widget, and a configurable F2 user menu.
• Terminal graphics — on terminals with a Kitty, Sixel or iTerm2 graphics protocol, the progress bars, process-explorer graphs, transfer speed graph and the disk-explorer treemap (a nested "pillow" map of each folder's biggest files) are drawn as true-pixel gradient images, falling back automatically to block-character rendering elsewhere (can be forced off in settings).
• Localization — Configurable UI language with 18 languages built in (English, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Czech, Slovak, Hungarian, Serbian, Ukrainian, Russian, Japanese, Chinese traditional & simplified, Hindi, Persian, Arabic); translations live in editable lang/*.toml files and new languages can be dropped in. Right-to-left scripts (Arabic, Persian) are shaped and bidi-reordered for display on terminals without native bidi support (a Reshape RTL text setting turns this off when the terminal handles bidi itself).
• Windows support — Full support for windows drives using the familiar Alt-F1/Alt-F2 Norton Commander shortcuts. All features except Drive Manager and Network Connections are available.

For a full, feature-by-feature walkthrough see the user manual — also available in-program by pressing F1.

On terminals where the function keys are awkward to reach, every Fn shortcut also has a Midnight-Commander-style alias: press Esc then a digit — Esc 1 … Esc 9 for F1…F9, and Esc 0 for F10 (or a quick Alt+digit).

Tab/arrows move between fields and onto the OK/Cancel buttons, Space toggles checkboxes and cycles choices, Enter confirms, Esc cancels (and aborts progress dialogs). The OK/Cancel and Yes/No buttons are also clickable.

See the user manual for the process-explorer, disk-explorer and hex-editor key tables, and for what every feature does.

Grab a release from the Releases page:

• Linux — rc-<ver>-<arch>.tar.gz archive, or a .deb (amd64, arm64 for Raspberry Pi 64-bit, armhf for 32-bit):

  sudo dpkg -i rat-commander_<ver>_arm64.deb

• Windows — rc-<ver>-x86_64-pc-windows-msvc.zip, or the .msi installer (adds rc to your PATH).
• macOS — rc-<ver>-<arch>.tar.gz, or the .pkg installer (installs rc to /usr/local/bin). Intel and Apple Silicon builds are provided. The package is unsigned, so the first launch may require System Settings → Privacy & Security → Open anyway.

Requires a recent stable Rust toolchain (edition 2024, Rust ≥ 1.85):

git clone https://github.com/dividebysandwich/rat-commander
cd rat-commander
cargo install --path .      # installs `rc` into ~/.cargo/bin
# or just run it:
cargo run --release

cargo build --release            # target/release/rc
cargo test                       # run the test suite
cargo clippy --all-targets       # lints

Release binaries are stripped and optimized via the [profile.release] settings in Cargo.toml.

The .github/workflows/release.yml workflow builds every artifact. To reproduce a build locally:

# Debian package (native arch)
cargo install cargo-deb
cargo build --release --target x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu
cargo deb --no-build --target x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu

# Raspberry Pi (cross-compiled) – needs Docker + `cross`
# (--no-default-features drops RAR, whose C++ lib won't cross-compile here)
cargo install cross
cross build --release --no-default-features --target aarch64-unknown-linux-gnu
cargo deb --no-build --no-strip --target aarch64-unknown-linux-gnu

# Windows MSI – on Windows with the WiX toolset
dotnet tool install --global wix --version 4.0.5
wix build packaging/windows/rc.wxs -d Version=0.1.0 \
    -d BinDir=target/x86_64-pc-windows-msvc/release -o rc.msi

# macOS .pkg – on macOS
pkgbuild --identifier com.rat-commander.rc --version 0.1.0 \
    --install-location /usr/local/bin --root <dir-containing-rc> rc.pkg

Some dependencies (unrar, bzip2, xz2, archive backends) compile bundled C/C++ sources, so a C/C++ toolchain is required (provided automatically by cross for the Raspberry Pi targets). RAR support is an optional build feature (rar, on by default), omitted from the Raspberry Pi (arm) packages because the C++ unrar library doesn't build with those cross toolchains.

Configuration lives in your platform config directory (~/.config/rat-commander/ on Linux): config.toml (written from the Settings dialog), themes.toml (editable color themes), lang/ (one editable TOML per UI language), and menu (the F2 user menu, in Midnight Commander format). See the user manual for details.

GNU General Public License, version 2 (GPL-2.0-only). See the LICENSE file.